NEW EXHIBITION 'e.m.10:Continua'

e.m.10: continua

22^nd October - 12th November 2010

Preview: Saturday 23rd October 6-9pm

Surface Gallery presents its second annual East Midlands graduate show, e.m.10: Continua. The exhibition will showcase ambitious new artworks commissioned specifically for the exhibition comprising of sculpture, installation, moving image and painting, from six recent Fine Art graduates: Kyle Hands, Scott Illingworth, Jonathan Ryall, Calvin Sangster, Victoria Smith and Emily Warren. These new, fresh and talented artists have been selected by Surface Gallery from regional universities of arts students who graduated in 2010. Curated by Surface Gallery, Continua offers these recent arts graduates with an opportunity to work with an established and contemporary arts organisation with the aim of providing them with a platform from which to launch their professional practices and artistic career.

The Surface Gallery Curatorial Team have supported, advised and challenged these young artists every step of the way in order to achieve a dynamic and innovative project whilst supporting regional graduate talent. The six artists have been selected on their strengths and abilities to convey, reflect, and explore the contemporary arts movement. Surface urges the artists to move above and beyond the works presented at their degree shows; we see their development and potential as they move from graduates to young professionals in Continua.

The independent creation of the pieces exhibited find unconscious thematic and aesthetic links as broad commonality between the artists present themselves: materiality and consumption; the transformation of realities into the sublime and sinister; explorations of time, space and movement; and the processes of artistic practice.

Surface Gallery has been significantly transformed with the removal of the partitioned walls which expands the gallery into one large, dynamic, and flexible exhibition space. e.m.10: Continua is the first exhibition to be held in the newly regenerated Surface Gallery.

The preview of the exhibition will be held on Saturday 23rd October 6-9pm, where you will be able to view the work and meet participating artists.

For this exhibition, Surface is launching a new education programme beginning with the Talk, Tea and a Tour event, in which Curators and Artists present a review of the exhibition, the work and individual influences. This will be followed by a refreshing cuppa and a tour of Surface, including Artist Studios and the newly renovated Project Space housing resident artists.

Preview: Saturday 23^rd October 6-9pm

Talk, Tea and a Tour: Saturday 6^th November 2 – 4pm

NEW EXHIBITION 'Terra Incognita'

Terra Incognita

Emma Dexter and Kashif Nadim Chaudry

Surface Project Space

22nd October – 12th November

Private view 23rd October 6 – 9pm

Surface Gallery invites international artist Emma Dexter and 2008 and New Art Exchange, Nottingham Castle Open winner Kashif Nadim Chaudry to install work responding directly to its newly renovated Project Space. ‘Terra Incognita’ which translates as ‘Unknown Ground’ explores transcending cultural barriers and subterranean themes as well as uncanny humour, desire, sensuality and identity. Elements of constructed realities and their potential to unravel are latent in the contributions of both artists.

Emma Dexter’s influences are a mixture of surrealism and issues surrounding today’s social culture. Her work is also autobiographical and informed by her obsession to translate the world around her. She recently returned from a residency located in the jungle, Las Pozas, Mexico. Emma’s unique relationship with Las Pozas has had a profound influence on how she sets about and articulates her more recent work and this is evident in ‘Terra Incognita’. For this exhibition Emma will be installing conceptually challenging sculptures with the subtext of cross - referencing between them. Questioning ideas on mortality, global disarray, decadence, perspective and identity. The pieces in this exhibition are colour associated, personified and will impose on the senses.

For ‘Terra Incognita’, Kashi Nadim Chaudry will make a new sculptural installation entitled ‘Harem’. On a conceptual level he deals with the death of desire and an exploration of his own transgressive sexuality as a gay man. From a pile of fabric, meticulously arranged in a kaleidoscope of colours, an arrangement of six ghostly figures slowly emerge, revealing their cloth covered corpses in all their anatomical detail. Desire has never been so tangible.

‘Terra Incognita’ opens 22nd October 2010. Surface Gallery welcomes all to come and explore these investigative and exciting art works. Opening hours are Tuesday – Friday 12pm- 6pm and Saturday 11am- 5pm.

Project 29 "Surface"

Project 29 is an exhibition featuring three artists (Carl Slater, Sally Angela Davies and David Ashton Hill)

The exhibition examines site specificity not exclusively as a genre but as a problem idea, as a peculiar inquiry of art and spacial politics that theorises the re-configorations of location. Combining art and site with the possibilities of intimacy through absence, distance and raptures of time and place - here the focus is a site that travels between two points of reference. It is a part of the River Trent that wends its way between Gunthorpe and Trent Bridge and the journey from there to a gallery space. The work intends to engage with site orientated study and the process at which ideas, objects and materials are gathered from one into the other, theorising the transformation point between the subject/object and the location through post modern conditions.

There will be an Artists Talk on Wednesday 6th October 2010, at 7pm